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Joseph Campbell Quotes - Page 16

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The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

Joseph Campbell
Emotional, Hands, Horizon
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.43, New World Library

What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.

Joseph Campbell
Play, Universe

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

Joseph Campbell
Dream, Stories, Inspired

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

Joseph Campbell
Adventure, Reflection, Artist
Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Stuart L. Brown (1990). “The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, p.12, New World Library

God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.

Joseph Campbell
Mind, Spheres, Senses
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.111, Anchor

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.

Joseph Campbell
Dream, Myth, Personalized
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.14, New World Library

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

Joseph Campbell
Book, Reading, Writing

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, God, Space
Joseph Campbell (2010). “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.26, ReadHowYouWant.com

Each of us has capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel.

Joseph Campbell
Real, Knowing, Boat

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.

Joseph Campbell
Men, Imagination, World
Joseph Campbell (2007). “The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987”, p.16, New World Library

The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Ideas, Sorrow

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

Joseph Campbell
Nature, Animal, Sea
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.40, Anchor

The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.

Joseph Campbell
Life, Bliss, Eternity
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.85, Anchor

Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historica l, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former-the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers-prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.

Joseph Campbell
Children, Hero, Adventure

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Commitment, Fate
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.20, New World Library

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.

Joseph Campbell
Adventure, Mean, Smell

Eternity is not the hereafter...this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere.

Joseph Campbell
Spiritual, Eternity, Follow Your Bliss

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Culture, Alive
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.72, Anchor

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.

Joseph Campbell
Class, Parent, Our Society
Joseph Campbell, Bill D. Moyers (1988). “The Power of Myth”, Harmony

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

Joseph Campbell
Eternity, Concept Of Time, Concepts

So I think the Guru can be a delusion. But everything can be deluding. The thing central about the Guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle of the spirit, namely, that you don't follow your own path; you follow a given path. And that's totaly contrary to the Western Spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization- authenticity in your life out of your own center. So you must take the message of the East, assimilate it to your own dimension and to your own thrust of life, and not get pulled off track.

Joseph Campbell
Thinking, Track, Realization

It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.

Joseph Campbell
Thinking, Majority Rule, Democracy
Joseph Campbell, Bill D. Moyers (1988). “The Power of Myth”, Harmony

In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part.

Joseph Campbell
Past, Space, Brain

Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.

Joseph Campbell
Selfish, Roots, Desire

The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.

Joseph Campbell
Compassion, Giving, Principles
Joseph Campbell (2009). “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Easyread Large Edition”, p.132, ReadHowYouWant.com

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